We are currently carrying the late Malachi Martin’s previously unpublished book for your discretion. (Click here for it; we appreciate it; a Christmas gift? Your call.)
We fully acknowledge that Malachi (once a Jesuit priest, then a bestselling author) is controversial and often made claims, especially on the late Art Bell’s highly popular radio show, that in some instances may have challenged credulity.
But we give air to all sides and were highly impressed with his book Hostage To the Devil.
Of Martin’s most sensational allegations during those radio interviews and in another book (this one a novel): That there once had been a “Satanic enthronement” at the Vatican.
First, let’s get this out of the way: In 1965, Martin, who died in requested and received a release from some of his Jesuit vows. He was given permission to live as a priest outside the Jesuit order and later was granted a form of “release” that allowed him to function as a priest but not as a Jesuit.
He continued to say Mass privately and considered himself a priest until his death. He was not laicized (defrocked) but also not in active public ministry. His insight into the Vatican came mainly as a close aide and scholar under Cardinal Augustin Bea, S.J. He also worked during the time of the Second Vatican Council as a translator and researcher.
What Father Martin asseverated was that the alleged “enthronement” took place in the Pauline chapel at the Vatican on July 1, 1963.
That July night, as the clocks in Rome struck midnight, Malachi Martin claimed that the satanic ceremony included extremely high-ranking members of the Catholic Church in the Vatican attempting to hand the Catholic Church over to Satan.
One of the most famous scenes in Martin’s novel was an alleged parallel satanic enthronement ritual in the U.S. South involving the abuse of a young girl Martin called “Agnes” (eleven years of age), extremely similar to a later-circulated account (at “a small chapel in South Carolina”).<[scroll for more:]
Whether Martin directly used that particular woman’s testimony or whether the woman later saw herself in the scene is not documented, but the parallel is undeniable.
Even commentators close to Martin have said: “It is clear that Martin based disturbing parts of the novel on real testimony that reached him.”
Father Martin purposefully wrote about it as “faction,” where there is some or a lot of truth but names and dates are changed for safety. No one could prove the alleged Vatican event was an actual satanic event that (supposedly) spiritually tanked the powers of exorcists across the world (of which Martin was one).
Was it a true claim?
The parallel fictionalized (or “factionalized’) enthronement in the U.S. involved several clerics (two of whom would be elevated beyond the priesthood).
Many years ago we spoke to a woman who exactly fit the description of “Agnes” many years ago. We withheld her name for obvious reasons. Her mother joined her in the conversation, during which she claimed that when she was a girl, she was taken into the basement of the church her family attended and made to participate in a satanic/sexual act with these clerics, one that involved a severe profanation of the Eucharist in a sexual act. We won’t get more explicit than that.
We never did verify what she told us.
As far as the Vatican, we do recall Paul VI–who was enthroned on June 30, 1963 (basically the date of Martin’s depiction)–and the Pontiff famously saying that “the smoke of Satan has found its way into the Church through the fissures.”
[scroll for more:]
It was an anguished warning that caused great shock and scandal, even within the Catholic world.
Much of it related to the insertion, in that dark decade, of neo-paganism, non-religiosity, and scientism into the Catholic faith (and not, as many have erroneously stated, Vatican Two, though we certainly have some issues with the aftermath and application of that Council).
Was there more to it than that?
Martin presents the supposed rituals as a pivotal spiritual event that “opens the doors” for demonic influence in the Church hierarchy.
One traditionalist and strongly anti-Vatican Two newspaper, The Remnant, said in 2021, “Even after twenty-five years, Father Malachi Martin’s book Windswept House [a novel] has lost none of its appeal. Father Martin characterized this book, as well as several of his other novels, as ‘faction,’ meaning they were based on real events, but ‘fictionalized’ by the changing of dates and names. At the end of an online version of his book is a key to the real identities of his characters. There we learn that the Church’s arch-enemies such as [a cardinal] are represented in the story, as well as St. Gallen Mafia members like Godfried Danneels.”
Please take the remark carefully; it could be slanderous.
A writer named Father Brian Harrison modified the above article in a commentary for The Remnant that said:
“Now, in column 1 on p. 5 she says that the real date of the infamous event described at the beginning of Windswept House is said to have been 1957, while in column 3 she says it took place ‘in the 1960s.’ I can clarify what Fr. Martin said was the true date of the Luciferian Enthronement inside the Vatican with the following information from a quarter-century ago that I have never made public until now.
“In the last decade of Malachi Martin’s life [he died in 1999; more on that Monday] I became a personal friend of his and would visit him in his Manhattan apartment whenever I was in New York. In the section headed ‘1963’ in the Prologue of Windswept House, we read that this shocking ceremony, enthroning ‘the Fallen Archangel Lucifer’ in the Chapel of St. Paul, took place on June 29, 1963, the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the eve of the coronation of the newly elected Pope Paul VI.
“It celebrated gloatingly the long-prepared-for arrival of a Pope more open to liberal changes than any of his predecessors. Around the time the book was published in 1996, Fr. Martin told me that this date was indeed “factional”, and that the true date of this blasphemous act of devilry, coordinated with a corresponding ceremony on the American side of the Atlantic, was actually one day later. That is, it took place the night after Paul’s VI’s coronation in St. Peter’s Square on the afternoon of Sunday, June 30. Malachi told me it was indeed carried out in the Chapel of St. Paul, as Windswept House says, and began at midnight on the night of June 30 / July 1, 1963.”
Midnight on the first of July in Rome would obviously be June 30 in the evening in South Carolina.
If memory serves, the woman who called us described it as being a Sunday morning.
Was the Vatican chapel re-consecrated? If there is truth to any of it, perhaps. For the story goes that Rome was notified.
At any rate: dangerous it is to cite specific names and places. One can also observe that the great wave of sexual abuse, at least in the U.S., began in the 1950s, not the Sixties. But the Sixties through the Eighties constituted a pivotal moment.
Pope Paul was right. He discerned correctly. Smoke had indeed entered, some of it by way of abuse, some by the way Vatican Two was misinterpreted or distorted, some by way of extremeism (right and left), some by way of over-intellectualization of Catholicsm, some by way of disobedience to Rome, which still plagues us.
–MHB
[More next week]
[resources: Malachi Martin: In the Shadows of the Vatican and Windswept House]
